Related papers: A Complexity View of Rainfall

We demonstrate how, from the point of view of energy flow through an open system, rain is analogous to many other relaxational processes in Nature such as earthquakes. By identifying rain events as the basic entities of the phenomenon, we…

We compare rain event size distributions derived from measurements in climatically different regions, which we find to be well approximated by power laws of similar exponents over broad ranges. Differences can be seen in the large-scale…

A moisture process with dynamics that switch after hitting a threshold gives rise to a rainfall process. This rainfall process is characterized by its random holding times for dry and wet periods. On average, the holding times for the wet…

Atmospheric flows exhibit fluctuations of all scales (space -time) ranging from turbulence (millimeters-seconds) to climate (thousands of kilometers-years). The apparently random fluctuations however exhibit long-range spatio-temporal…

Turbulence, namely, irregular fluctuations in space and time characterize fluid flows in general and atmospheric flows in particular.The irregular,i.e., nonlinear space-time fluctuations on all scales contribute to the unpredictable nature…

Localized rain events have been found to follow power-law size and duration distributions over several decades, suggesting parallels between precipitation and seismic activity [O. Peters et al., PRL 88, 018701 (2002)]. Similar power laws…

We analyze the statistics of water droplet avalanches in a continuously driven system. Distributions are obtained for avalanche size, lifetime, and time between successive avalanches, along with power spectra and return maps. For low flow…

Global warming is projected to intensify the hydrological cycle, amplifying risks to ecosystems and society. While extreme rainfall appears to exhibit stronger sensitivity to global warming compared to mean rainfall rates, a unifying…

The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…

Rainfall exhibits extreme variability at many space and time scales and calls for a statistical description. Based on an analysis of radar measurements of precipitation over the tropical oceans, we introduce a new probability law for the…

Nonequilibrium complex systems are often effectively described by the mixture of different dynamics on different time scales. Superstatistics, which is "statistics of statistics" with two largely separated time scales, offers a consistent…

We analyse the probability densities of daily rainfall amounts at a variety of locations on the Earth. The observed distributions of the amount of rainfall fit well to a q-exponential distribution with exponent q close to q=1.3. We discuss…

Atmospheric flows, an example of turbulent fluid flows, exhibit fractal fluctuations of all space-time scales ranging from turbulence scale of mm -sec to climate scales of thousands of kilometers - years and may be visualized as a nested…

In many complex systems a continuous input of energy over time can be suddenly relaxed in the form of avalanches. Conventional avalanche models disregard the possibility of internal dynamical effects in the inter-avalanche periods, and thus…

In the present paper we demonstrate the results of a statistical analysis of some characteristics of precipitation events and propose a kind of a theoretical explanation of the proposed models in terms of mixed Poisson and mixed exponential…

The statistics of natural catastrophes contains very counter-intuitive results. Using earthquakes as a working example, we show that the energy radiated by such events follows a power-law or Pareto distribution. This means, in theory, that…

What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…

Studying water droplets is a rich lesson in fields of fluid dynamics, nonlinear systems, and differential equations. Understanding various physical aspects of raindrops can help us in understanding drop dynamics, rainfall density…

We introduce a simple model for the size distribution of avalanches based on the idea that the front of an avalanche can be described by a directed random walk. The model captures some of the qualitative features of earthquakes, avalanches…

One of the key clues to consider rainfall as a self-organized critical phenomenon is the existence of power-law distributions for rain-event sizes. We have studied the problem of universality in the exponents of these distributions by means…